by Anya Nowlan
“I didn’t know the Predators’ supply team cared so much.”
“Only for the special cases.”
“So you’re calling me special?”
“You’re special all right,” she said with a sigh, shaking her head. “So why’d you get in touch with me to begin with?”
The words felt heavy as hell, coming from her mouth. It was a thought that had kept plaguing her for days and days now—consuming her attention and her time—trying to figure out what the hell Heath was plotting by trying to get close to her. Was it just to piss off her brothers? To mock her in some way? To publicly humiliate her?
After Mackey, none of those options sounded too far-fetched. There was something to be said on the topic of remaining vigilant with these hockey bastards.
“I had fun with you,” Heath replied, sounding as earnest as she’d ever heard him. “I thought we could maybe have a repeat. Not of the broom closet fucking,” he hastened to add, “But just… you know. Getting to know one another. I’d like that.”
“Why?” she asked, deadpan as usual.
“Why?” Heath echoed as if needing to confirm that she’d really asked something that dumb. “Because you called me out on my shit and wouldn’t let me run my mouth. That’s rare in my line of work, though I guess you would know.”
She could see the way he shrugged his shoulders, and it was as if someone had disturbed a mountain next to her and it had suddenly shifted a little. He was no small man and even though the air was cold, she felt his presence keenly, his scent wafting into her nostrils and the heat of his body seeming to warm hers as well. It was an odd feeling, all in all, being so incredibly aware of someone like that.
Everything he did seemed to register immediately with Sable. Her mouth was dry trying to talk to him, so she kept sipping on the hot chocolate and not really feeling the taste anymore. Maybe it had burned her tongue. She had no way of being sure because her thoughts were swimming around and focusing on any one emotion seemed impossibly hard.
“I guess I would,” she agreed, feeling curiously tongue-tied.
Sable really wasn’t the kind of girl to run out of things to say, even at the weirdest of times. And definitely not in a situation where she was faced with some cocky hockey prick who thought he could have any woman he wanted just with a wink and a smile! Or at least that had been her take on the situation when she’d decided to take him up on the offer to sit and chat for a moment. She’d been meaning to tell him to leave her alone, and go bother someone else.
Yet now, sitting next to him, she felt more like a teenager nervous about whether he liked her too than anything else. And he wasn’t anything near his impossibly self-admiring self, behaving in a rather subdued fashion just as she had.
“It’s getting late. I should probably let you go. I have practice tomorrow and I imagine Coach is going to tear all of us a new one.”
“You’re welcome for that one,” Sable said with a grin, though she felt inexplicably sad at the realization that their little pow-wow would have to end so soon.
“Yeah, thanks,” Heath grumbled, hopping off the tailgate and helping her down as well, though the fact that he’d offered his hand and even more that she’d taken it seemed to be a surprise for both of them.
Sable froze for a moment, her hand still in his, realizing how very tall Heath was in comparison to her and how close they were. And how dark it was. And how much she wanted him to kiss her.
What?! No you don’t!
Sable recoiled from him, bumping into the truck for a moment before she could hop to the side and put a few paces between them.
“Guess I’ll see you at the game,” she called, rushing toward the house.
“Guess so,” Heath called back, and the silence that followed seemed deafening. “Hey, Sable?”
“Yeah?” she asked, too mortified by her own lack of decorum to stop and turn around.
“Think we could do this again sometime?”
“Sure!” she responded. “Have your people get in touch with my people!”
What the hell are you doing, Sable? Oh my God. Just shut up!
“I’ll get straight on that,” Heath said, chuckling as he opened the driver’s side door and slipped in.
Sable took the stairs to the guesthouse in twos, and when she put her hand on the handle of the front door, she turned to watch Heath flick on the high beams and pull out of the yard. She was as surprised as anyone to find herself grinning like a fool in love when she stepped into the house, shaking her head.
You’re so screwed.
CHAPTER SIX
Heath
“Keep up!” Heath roared, plowing through the pristine, fresh snow on the snowmobile, his voice carrying over the growl of the engine.
The grin he was wearing was the most genuine he’d had in a long, long time, and despite having to keep his eyes on where he was going, he kept glancing over his shoulder at the beautiful creature catching up to him with every twist and turn. Sable was only behind him by a couple of lengths now and if he didn’t speed it up, she was going to overtake him.
Can’t let her win that easy, he thought, revving the engine harder and making a tight turn around a couple of thick pine trees, cutting Sable’s path off and giving himself a slightly more leisurely lead.
They’d been on the mountain for more than four hours now, riding around and seeing how hard they could make the adrenaline pump through their veins. Answer was—pretty damn hard! Heath whooped as Sable caught up to him again and they broke out of the stretch of forest they’d been going through neck and neck, snow billowing behind them like a thick carpet. He glanced at her and she grinned back, the safety goggles muddling her gorgeous eyes, but her lips still just as inviting as they had been that night at the bar.
Fuck, she’s gorgeous, he thought, losing his concentration for a moment and causing him to make a hazardous turn to avoid hitting a large rock sticking out right in the middle of his path.
“Shit!” he hissed, going into a tailspin.
He managed to right his course just in time to avoid rolling over, but it killed the engine. Sable turned around and a moment later she was next to him, smiling like she’d just won the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup together.
“I was telling you, man. If you can’t stand the heat…”
“Very funny,” Heath quipped back, brushing a hand through his hair as he peeled off the helmet and the goggles before relaxing on the seat, taking a deep breath.
It wasn’t just Sable who was gorgeous to look at. They were high up on one of the mountains surrounding Shifter Grove and from their vantage point, they could see Wolf’s Eye Lake, the ice arena in the distance, and even dots of the town itself, chimneys poking up out of the snow. The day was serene and though the sun was tipping low, the snow shimmered and caught every ray of sunshine it could, everything pristinely quiet around them now that the snowmobiles had been silenced.
“It’s beautiful up here,” Sable said, following Heath’s lead and taking off her helmet and goggles as well.
Her hair cascaded down around her shoulders and it took everything he had to keep from reaching out and curling a finger around one of those locks, or pulling her closer to kiss her. He wanted to, desperately, but he’d promised himself that he’d give her all the space she needed. It’d been difficult enough to get her to come out with him in the first place; he didn’t want to scare her off before things got anywhere near interesting.
“So are you,” he said, not an ounce of bravado in his voice.
She flicked a dubious look at him and he saw the moment when her eyebrows arched a little in surprise, reading the earnestness in his expression.
Heath shrugged his shoulders, looking into the distance in an effort to settle down both the man and the bear. His grizzly was attempting to convince him to basically tackle her, and despite clear interest in doing so, he didn’t think that would help his cause either. Restraint was such a bore.
“Thanks. Feeling a bi
t schmaltzy today, huh?” Sable said after a bout of silence, giving him a wink.
Heath breathed a bit easier. Banter he could do.
“Oh, well, the games always make me get so emotional. You know, everything on the line, all those children hoping to see me conquer and win so they could dream of becoming me one day, all that.”
“You’re telling me there’s a gaggle of kids somewhere, dreaming about being a misogynistic puck donkey?”
“Hey, that’s unfair,” Heath said, gasping as if she’d shot him in the chest as they sat facing opposite directions, their snowmobiles parked next to one another. “I’m an opportunistic puck donkey, thank you. Get your terminology straight. It could save lives.”
“Whose lives?”
“Those of my adoring fans. You wouldn’t want to gravely wound them with your hateful comments, right?”
“Oh, of course I wouldn’t. Because that’d be bad,” Sable said, nodding with a serious look on her face before breaking out in a laugh. “Fine, opportunistic. I’ll pretend to live with that.”
“Fantastic. We’ve reached an agreement. See how easy it can be? And I had to basically drag you along on this little date of ours,” Heath said with a chuckle, though he bit his lip a second later.
Stupid.
“So this is a date, huh? I thought we were simply ‘friendly people from rival camps’ going to ‘pound some powder’ together. What happened to that?” Sable asked, the sweet tint of mockery in her voice grating at him as much as it was honey to his ears.
“Isn’t that what you say when you ask someone out on a date in California?”
“No, we make up some lame excuse about going to try out the new artisan taco truck and implying that they could or could not join us, if they wanted to, or whatever.”
Shaking her head, Sable took her gloves off so she could run her fingers through her hair before tying it up in a ponytail. Heath watched, practically mesmerized. He still hadn’t figured out what it was about that woman that got him so hot and bothered, but whatever it was, he was loving it. She kept his attention better than hockey could at times, and that was something he never thought he could claim about anyone.
It was ten kinds of weird and he couldn’t get enough of it.
And the fact that he still hadn’t kissed her since San Diego was driving him up a tree. Or it would have, if they hadn’t been on a stretch of barren snow.
“I like our way better,” Heath said, smirking.
“Personally, I might prefer surfing to this, but I guess I can settle.”
“Nonsense. There is no settling when it comes to Heath Locklear. You’ve been blessed with my magnificent presence. No surfing could compare,” he said, putting all the fake swagger he could into his voice.
It was a gamble. He was half-expecting to find a helmet flying in the general direction of his head. It was a small mercy that it didn’t; he wasn’t on the market for another concussion just then. The headache he’d gotten from trying to talk her into coming along in the first place had been hard enough to handle.
It had taken two whole days of bombarding her with silly jokes and making conversation on SassyDate before he could get anything near to a commitment out of her. Luckily, he’d been clever enough to figure out what it was that was keeping her from saying yes immediately, because based on the night at the Hamiltons, she clearly had at least some interest in seeing what kind of trouble a hockey star and a sassy girl with too much lip on her could get themselves into.
It was her brothers she was worried about. Or, stepbrothers, as she kept correcting him.
It wasn’t an unfounded reason. Heath had no doubt that the Lynderly twins would bust his head open like a coconut given the chance, and that was even before they would come to find out that he was hitting on their sister. While Heath was sure that their protectiveness had less to do with wanting to see her safe and more to do with staking claim to their family, it was still a real enough issue to take into consideration.
Neither the Predators nor the Shovelers needed that kind of drama at the moment.
“Sure. I’ll take you surfing next time you’re in Cali and then we can prepare, hmm?”
“Oh, fishing for a second date already? Man, you work fast, Miss Lynderly. I like it.”
Heath grinned even wider when he saw the slight blush cross her cheeks, making her look almost girlish in her modest embarrassment. He had to imagine that Sable wasn’t the kind of woman to be caught off-guard too often, and the fact that he could do that to her made him feel a tiny bit smug. It could only mean that he was getting under her skin, just as she had gotten under his.
“It’s getting late though. I think we need to go before we can’t find our way back.”
“Oh, scared of a little darkness?” Sable taunted, turning on the engine of the yellow snowmobile and putting on her gear again. “I thought Heath Locklear was fearless.”
“Just worried about you, baby,” he said, plopping on the helmet and the goggles with gusto. “Race you,” he called, turning on the engine and taking off when she was putting on the last glove.
“Asshole!” she yelled after him, but Heath knew that she was going to throttle hard and probably be on his tail in a few seconds.
That was what he liked about her so much, that tenacity. She wouldn’t give up. It meant she had to get the last word in every conversation and that she’d probably be horrible to play board games with, but he loved it all the same. Though why was he considering playing board games with some girl he’d originally just wanted to fuck again was a whole other matter entirely.
The path down the mountains took slightly longer than he’d expected, because the steep downward paths were getting treacherous as the light fell, and as much as Heath liked winning, he also liked making it back home alive. Even more than that he was worried about Sable’s safety, which was something that surprised him more than he could put into words.
Heath had always had some anger issues. Bursts of emotion that spilled out of him like a tidal wave all of a sudden and would make him see red, go berserk. He’d found an outlet for it in hockey like some shifters did in military service or dangerous jobs, but it only took him so far. He’d always had that edge to him, making him hover at the very tip of going from glad to mad, from safe to fucking ballistic. But around Sable, all of that seemed to mellow out and he liked the way it felt.
When they finally made it down to his truck and loaded up the snowmobiles on the trailer—his first purchase when he’d realized just how much snow there was in the mountains at the right time of the year—it was already dark inside and both of them were freezing. Heath hopped into the car and cranked up the heater as Sable climbed in on the passenger side, their helmets tossed on the floor and Sable blowing on her hands for warmth.
“It’ll just be a second,” he said. “Truck needs to warm up a little. What do you think, dinner at the diner?”
“You don’t think that’s pushing your luck, Shoveler? I can count at least two Predators who will take it as a personal insult to see you hanging out with me.”
“Please. I’m not afraid of your brothers,” Heath scoffed, unzipping his jacket a little as the cabin started warming up.
“Oh yeah? So who are you afraid of then?” Sable asked with a cocked brow.
Heath paused, frowning slightly as they locked eyes. He had a dozen good quips about how he wasn’t afraid of anything, or possibly “a ghost,” but none of those felt like it would fit the moment. In a flash of what must have been insanity, he reached out and took her cold hands into his big, gruff paws. He blew on her hands and rubbed them between his palms, trying to warm them up.
Her nose was pinched red by the cold and so were her cheeks now, but her lovely chestnut eyes sparkled with surprise and something else he couldn’t quite decipher. Whatever it was though, it wasn’t bad.
“I’m afraid we’ll play the last game and you’ll disappear again. I don’t want that to happen.”
She stared at
him, dumbfounded. She looked cute as hell, surprised like that and he could commiserate—he was confused as all hell too. But then she shied away and Heath frowned. Had he said something wrong? He reached a hand out, putting it on her wrist.
“Hey, talk to me here. What’s going on?”
“I… it’s dumb. I had a breakup. It wasn’t pretty,” she muttered.
“And what does that have to do with me?” he asked, maybe a bit too sharply.
It was only because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her company because of some douchebag ex. What’s a bear got to do to get a chance around here?
“He was a hockey player too. A real douchebag.”
“So a lot like me?” Heath asked with a wry smile.
“Maybe. Are you a douchebag?”
“I wouldn’t be for you,” he said in earnest, making Sable crack a smile.
“Right. You know he humiliated me on national television? After a game with the Seattle Timberwolves a month ago, I was standing next to him while he was giving an interview and he told the interviewer point blank that there was no one special in his life and he was fucking his way through the East Coast. I was in the fucking shot, man, staring up at him like he’d taken a pistol and gotten me right between the eyes.”
“Oh, right. I think I remember that. You dated Mackey, right? He’s a douchebag,” Heath confirmed.
“That’s all I’m saying,” Sable sighed.
His insides twisted, thinking of her getting hurt like that. For a hot second, all he wanted to do was to go out to Seattle and beat Mackey’s ass into the ground for doing that to her. That fucktard. But Heath took a few calming breaths and then looked back to Sable.
“I won’t be like that. I promise.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you, just like that?”
“What do you have to lose?” he asked with a grin. “You’ve already been dumped on national television, could it really get any worse?”
“Smartass,” she scoffed.
